Moral Repair

For John, BLUF:  We are going to have to have some sort of a reckoning with regard to the CIA torture problem.  Nothing to see here; just move along.  But not a witch hunt. 

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From The Washington Post we have Opinionator Walter Pincus looking at the question of individuals involved in Torture or in Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, "Immunity and interrogators: A second look".

This is an interesting article in that it talks about the fact that the Senate Report on CIA Interrogations is not the first time we have heard of this.

Mentioned in the article is SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape).  Some of what happened in the CIA interrogation program was from reverse engineering of the SERE program.

For an outside look at this issue—outside the beltway—Writer and Playwright Carla Seaquist gives us "Torture Report: America Conducts a Moral Reckoning. Next, Moral Repair?".  This column was published by The Huffington Post.  Ms Seaquist raises an important point when she talks to "Moral Repair".

This whole issue is complicated.  Ms Seaquist points out that Bush Administration Department of Justice official John Yoo, the supposed author of the "Torture Memo", recently said to CNN:

"If these things happened as they're described in the report....they were not supposed to be done. And the people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders."

One side issue in this imbroglio is the role of the Vice President in Government.  I believe the Vice President is an inherently legislative position.  That was the view of President Washington and appears to have been the view up through President Roosevelt.  More recent Presidents have pulled the Vice President into the realm of the Executive Branch.  This change is shown by the fact that the Vice President staff includes those who are inherently legislative personnel and those who are part of the executive branch.  This raises the question of how, in this day and age, we can impeach a President without first impeaching his or her Vice President for the same problems.  Not that I am keen on impeachment.

Regards  —  Cliff